


Save the Last Dance

by DecoySocktopus



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror, Clowns, Do Not Archive, M/M, Mind Control, Nonconathon Treat, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-07
Updated: 2018-07-07
Packaged: 2019-05-27 19:15:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15031442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DecoySocktopus/pseuds/DecoySocktopus
Summary: Danny is with him, every moment of the day. He is present in all the trains, the stations, the cafés and bookstores. He is an extra in the corners of movie posters, his face is on every television screen Tim passes.Danny is dead. Danny is everywhere. And Tim is running out of ways to avoid him.





	Save the Last Dance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nonconamod](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nonconamod/gifts).



> Danny showed up in canon too late to be nominated, but that's no reason to exclude him from the party! Also, a brief note on warnings- the tagged clown shows up in one scene only, and is not involved in anything sexual. My apologies to anyone who was hoping otherwise.

Tim opens the newspaper and stares into the face of his dead brother.

It’s a toothpaste advertisement. Danny flashes teeth, computer-bleached and bright, the beach behind him an afterthought, or maybe an invitation. He smiles like a good-looking young guy with buckets of talent and his life stretching out ahead of him. He smiles as if he still has a future.

Tim almost vomits on his picture. And even after he reins himself in, his stomach roils; he stares at the wall opposite his desk and wonders what fucking inconsiderate coincidence, what inhumane anomaly of fate saw fit to paste Danny’s photograph in the middle of The Guardian. One full page ad of inked-in cruelty. The stock photo from hell.

He’s paralysed, for a while. He thinks about closing the paper and dropping it into the bin. About wandering over to Jon’s barely used but much larger office and stealing one of the lighters he thinks he’s so subtle about hiding; having a bonfire over the boss’ desk. And then he thinks about Danny’s smile disintegrating into so much smoke, and has to fight the nausea all over again.

Tim tears out the advertisement and hides it in a desk drawer. Then he takes an early lunch.

Danny smoulders at the public from the side of the number 22 bus; the beach is replaced by a sensual sitting room, and a glass of top shelf whiskey in his hand. His hair is styled in a careless manner that must have taken hours to achieve. His expression is superior, and so utterly out of character that Tim twitches towards his phone. He wants to take a picture. Text it to Danny, _Saw your new whiskey ad, you look like an idiot lol_.

But Danny died four years ago. There’s no one to read the text.

On the brick wall next to Tim’s favourite café, Danny stares solemnly from the cheap gluey paper posters, six of them lined up like soldiers. He carries several thick books, wears an academic’s gown and advertises a private college.

He’s inside the café as well, grinning from the cover of a men’s health magazine left out for customers to read. Tim’s hands shake as he swipes his credit card and retrieves his coffee. The shock is wearing off; now, the little jolts of recognition are quickly turning into rage. Someone is doing this on purpose. Some heartless, soulless creature is playing games at his expense.

Tim throws his untouched coffee into the nearest public bin. The lid pops off, sloshing all over the crumpled paper wrappings and food scraps; Tim catches sight of a glossy brochure, some religious advertisement, Danny’s pious grimace quickly drowned in hot coffee.

There doesn’t seem much point in going back to work, although Martin would probably disagree. Martin would want to take another statement, or to do some research, or to talk incessantly under the misguided assumption that Tim actually wants his sympathy. And he doesn’t want sympathy. He wants revenge. But apparently Elias finds that unreasonable, which means there’s no point in going back to the Institute.

Going to a pub and drinking himself senseless has some appeal. But it would require more effort than Tim can spare, even angry as he is.

He goes home. Danny is in the train with him, present in the lurid chewing gum advertisements on the walls. Danny meets him at the station, telling him that he might be eligible for a low-interest home loan, and why doesn’t he visit the bank to find out? Danny’s glossy grin peers from posters and flyers and magazine covers, from the billboard outside the station where he sits behind the wheel of the newest Toyota.

Home, Tim opens the Internet and starts to research…something. Stops as soon as Danny’s somewhat sheepish grin peeks out at him from ads for male enhancement medication, for ‘organic, vegan-friendly, gluten-free pasta’, for discounted takeaways, for job-seeking sites ( _Join us now!_ ). The latter seems a step too far, and Tim slams his laptop closed harder than he needs to.

It’s evening when he hears the rustling at the bottom of his front door. He stares at it over his cheap curry dinner; watches the slip of paper make its slow way under the door. After a while, it stops moving. There is no sound from the other side.

“Fuck you,” Tim says amiably, and goes back to his curry.

When curiosity inevitably drives him to investigate, he’s not surprised by what he finds.

It’s a flyer for Covent Garden Theatre, just like the one from before; all over in Cyrillic that he can’t read, black and white and sketchy. The paper is yellowed with age, dogeared and marked with fold lines. In the bottom right corner is the clown.

In the bottom left is Danny. And, buried under the unfamiliar lettering, so faded he almost misses it, Tim finds one solitary word in English.

 _Tonight_.

He’ll go, of course. That’s what they’re counting on. But even knowing that this is almost certainly a trap, Tim doesn’t think twice before pulling on his shoes and coat and locking the flat up behind him. He’s possessed by a spiteful drive, a motivation made of rage and the knowledge that he’s been forbidden from doing this. That Elias will be furious when he finds out, because Tim is… what? An angry, unstable man? A liability to the Institute?

Of course he is. How could he be anything else?

It is very dark outside. Tim goes to see his dead brother.

He has never forgotten how to get into the buried ruins of Covent Garden Theatre; all the secret routes, the twists and turns that Danny once worked out for him. Those directions are as clear to him as the pictures of his brother that he passes on the way. More advertisements, more glossy, glassy stock pictures that line up on London brick and concrete, line up for each to tear out a little piece of his heart.

And despite the carefully edited smiles, all Tim can think of is Danny in the early morning dark and stillness, sitting in his armchair with tears on his cheeks.

The auditorium is as cold as he remembers it. The unseeing stone audience with their indented “eyes” sit still and fixed facing the stage. Tim doesn’t bother to look at them. He ignores the pricking at the back of his neck as he takes the stairs down towards an empty stage; his little headlight is verging on useless, but as he approaches a spotlight switches on. It illuminates the centre of the stage like a full moon. And although Tim has never been an actor, he knows what it is telling him: _this is where you stand. Come here_.

There is no sign of Danny.

Tim steps onto the stage and looks around. The curtains hang heavy, dusty; from the wings, he thinks he can hear whispers. When he turns to face the seats, he is met with a wall of perpetual darkness, stretching out far beyond what his eyes can see. He doesn’t know if the audience still watches. He feels uncomfortable anyway; stage fright of a kind, except that his fear has a very different source.

He’s not actually alone; his eyes adjust, he begins to see breaks in the shadow. Patches of muted colour and shape, insubstantial remembrances of nightmares. And one of them is moving.

In one corner of the stage, the clown slouches in on itself, its body folded accordion-like, over and over. Its hair is limp, its face paint smeared and streaky. It sniffs the air as Tim stares in horrified silence. Peels its lips back in a grin that reveals rows of needle teeth. There are far too many of them. They line the gaping maw of its mouth, like sharp lace edging on a funeral dress.

“Welcome back,” it says in a voice like a rotten toffee apple. “Would you like your encore now?”

Tim finds his legs frozen underneath him. He tries to pull them free, but it’s not at all like being trapped in quicksand. He almost feels as if his legs are not his own. As if he does not know them, and they obey another master. He’s as still as the stone audience. He stands under a full-moon spotlight, knees shaking, heartbeat wild, and the clown in the corner starts to move.

“No,” he says through numb lips. “I’m just here for Danny. Just let me see my brother.”

The clown’s cackle cuts at him like a sprint through a field of razor blades. “I’m afraid you missed your brother’s act; you came too late, and the show moved on. But if you’d like, we can always reunite you backstage. He’s looking for a partner for his next performance. Can you dance?”

It begins to unfold. Tim thinks briefly of a child’s cut paper snowflake, like the ones he himself once made in school. Fold it out, over and over, to reveal a dozen snowflakes, a compact illusion that sprawls beyond belief. That’s what the clown is like. It expands across the stage towards him.

In one implausibly long arm, it has a sharp, flat knife. Tim makes a choked sound of horror. His legs are not his own.

“Nikola said we mustn’t,” says a voice right behind him, and Tim flinches with such intensity that he swears his skin loosens around him. There are hands on his shoulders. In the spotlight, he can make out the black thread stitches circumnavigating the wrists and venturing up the back of each hand. Slowly, he turns his head.

Danny isn’t smiling. His face has no expression at all. He holds Tim’s shoulders in his stitch-scarred hands and stares at the unfolding clown with eyes that look just a little too glassy.

“Nikola says to _wait_ ,” he insists. His voice is just close enough to Danny’s that Tim feels a pang of something sharp and painful. It’s not quite right. It’ll do. “The servants of the Eye will dance with us when the time is right, and not before. You have to wait.”

The clown comes to a juddering halt. One arm extends several feet beyond the rest of its body, still creased from the folding.

“He volunteered,” it says. “He came back without protection, of his own free will. He volunteers.”

“I invited him,” Danny says. He is close enough that Tim imagines he can feel his brother’s breath on his neck. But he can’t. Danny is not breathing. Neither is the clown; it holds still, half-unfolded, twitching in the air. There is a sense of silent tension. A struggle. And Tim understands what the prize is.

“I have the leaflet,” he croaks. He fumbles in his coat pocket, praying to nothing and everything, hoping it hasn’t crumbled liked the last. His fingers meet paper, soft and furred with age. He pulls it out, too afraid to feel triumphant, and tosses it at the clown.

“He was invited,” Danny says, squeezing Tim’s shoulders. “He’s my guest. I need him here for the dance rehearsal, or how will he know his steps on opening night?”

“My- what?” Another squeeze from Danny’s hands stops any further questions. There is something odd about them; the skin is stretched too tight, one size too small. In the spaces between stitching, something…shifts.

“He’s mine,” Danny says and, slowly, the clown begins to retreat.

“If you’re sure,” it says in a tone Tim would almost call sulky. “If you want him clumsy in the meantime. He’d be much better off worn by something with real rhythm.”

It folds itself back up. Reels itself in like a winding spool of thread, like a piece of origami finding its form. Like a jack-in-a-box, it bends and twists and returns to its corner. Something red and sticky seeps from its bent-back joints. It sighs its way into silence.

And Tim is left alone with Danny.

He doesn’t know what to say. All his earlier anger is gone; he’s afraid of the strength he feels in Danny’s hands, and of the flickers of colour he sees peeking from between the tidy stitches. Even through his shirt, he can feel how cold Danny’s skin is. Can smell the artificial sting of preservative, the scent of cloves that strives to cover it.

“I’m so sorry about the reception,” Danny says. Tonelessly, without emphasis. His voice is a blank birthday card, absent of individuality. It only barely sounds like Tim’s brother. “Next time I’ll meet you at the door. Or I could come and get you from home.”

Tim tries to imagine opening his front door to this creature. Seeing it in the warm light of his living room. “No. Please, don’t do that.”

“Your choice.”

Finally, Tim finds the strength to pull himself free. He stumbles away from Danny, unprepared for the ease with which he’s released when he makes his intentions clear. The spotlight follows him as he moves. It leaves Danny in darkness.

Tim turns to face him.

He’s struck again by the impression that Danny has shrunk a little, that he is somehow reduced from the bright, energetic man who drew eyes in any room he entered. This Danny stands in the shadows, his stitches lurid against skin that seems too pale. Colourless in death.

Or, not quite colourless. Tim has seen the creature underneath; he sees it now, in the flickers of light, of red-blue-violet-yellow-green that slip through the gaps between stitches. Underneath Danny’s skin is a kaleidoscopic monster, a rainbow dancer, a strange and uncanny thing. He remembers that it was very beautiful. That it seemed so much freer without the ill-fitting burden of his brother’s skin.

But right now, it’s pretending. It’s a Danny who is not quite perfect, but not ruined enough that Tim can accept him as gone. The eyes, though glassy, are the colour he remembers. Danny holds a hand out, and Tim doesn’t run.

“They’re ready,” he says. From the corner of his eye, Tim sees movement in the wings. Restless, whispering, flesh-tone costumes rustling with nerves. They seem to be waiting for something. Their cue, maybe. Or permission.

He clears his throat, for all the good it does him. “Are you going to kill me?”

Danny shakes his head stiffly, as if the gesture is one he’s only ever seen, and never tried himself. “No,” he says. “Of course not. This is just a rehearsal.”

“Right. Yeah. Because that doesn’t sound scary at all.”

Danny attempts what he probably thinks is a smile. It’s…ghastly. “It’s alright, Tim. You’re my partner. I chose you, and we’ll be dancing together when the time comes. I just want to make sure you can manage it. I want to help you be ready, so you don’t come apart at the seams.” It doesn’t sound like a metaphor.

Tim eyes the outstretched hand, the black stitches, the glove-like stretch of skin that doesn’t quite fit. He thinks that if he could just convince himself that this is not Danny, he might be able to run. But he can’t.

“May I have this dance?” Danny asks, and Tim takes his hand.

He wakes up in bed.

There is no sense of intervening time, no gap that he can identify. He holds Danny’s hand, feels the chill of his skin, its odd, rubbery texture. And then he feels sheets, his pyjamas, the dull heaviness of a brand new day. He could almost convince himself that it was all a dream. Except for the pain.

It feels like he’s been stung by nettles, or suffered through a severe bout of some very amateur acupuncture. Tim drags himself out of bed and to the bathroom, stripping as he does. The warm bathroom light doesn’t reveal anything; he’s a little pale, with the usual shadows under his eyes. His skin still fits as it should. But the stinging continues in lines around his body. Around his neck and armpits and elbows and knees, his hips and up the back of his skull. Around his wrists and up the back of his hands.

Tim looks closer, flexing his fingers and watching the tendons move. He sees the stitches.

They’re practically invisible under normal light; he wonders if a white ink was used, something pale and mostly imperceptible, something subtle and strange. He wonders how it is that he is missing memories of his entire night. That, somehow, he blocked out being stripped naked and tattooed with hundreds of tiny white stitches.

Distantly, Tim is aware of a whimpering sound, a sort of soft, shuddering series of moans. It takes him far too long to identify himself as the source of the noise. He’s busy counting his stitches.

A very bleak part of him wonders if he should count himself lucky that they didn’t also tattoo him with a little pair of scissors and a tiny, white “CUT HERE”. As if the instructions weren’t already clear enough. It’s almost a surprise that they’re needed at all, given how many people they’ve probably been skinning in the four years since…

Since Danny.

Tim leaves the house earlier than he normally would. He doesn’t go to work. He doesn’t go back to the stage, the clown, the dancers. Instead, he wanders.

Danny is with him, every moment of the day. He is present in all the trains, the stations, the cafés and bookstores. He is an extra in the corners of movie posters, his face is on every television screen Tim passes. And after a while, he’s in other people’s faces too. Tim sees echoes of his nose, the shape of his cheekbones, the line of his jaw, the colour of his eyes. He sees them like little Danny-shaped jigsaw puzzle pieces, split up and spread across the faces of the shoppers and businesspeople he passes. On each of them, a fragment of Danny.

Washing his hands in a men’s public restroom, Tim looks up and sees Danny’s face in the mirror.

For the longest moment, they stare at each other. Tim blinks; his eyes drop to Danny’s neck, and he can just about see the stitch marks marching across his skin, orderly like little white ants on a mission.

He thinks about slamming his forehead into the mirror until it breaks. The mirror or his skull; he doesn’t care which.

In the back of his mind, like an echo of memory, Tim hears strange music. His stitches sting. Abruptly, he aches to move. And when his feet take him out of the restroom and back into the gloomy, cloud-strewn day, Tim doesn’t bother to object, though he doubts it would matter if he did. His body is returned to him, and the message is clear. He won’t be hurting himself.

He suspects that’s Danny’s job.

Tim goes home when the colours start to leech from the sky, when the darkness makes Danny’s features hard to make out from his posters and flyers and billboards. He buys another bad takeaway dinner. He doesn’t respond to Martin’s worried text, or to the one missed call from a number he suspects belongs to Elias.

And he doesn’t go back to the stage, with its silent stone spectators and the dancers treading lightly in the wings. Instead, with a vague hope that the world will take the hint and leave him alone, Tim goes to bed. He doesn’t dream of Danny’s face. Doesn’t dream of anything at all.

Some immeasurable time later, Tim wakes up in the darkness, and someone is fucking him.

It’s a slower realisation than it should be. He feels heavy, bleary, out of touch with himself. He hears music stinging a harsh tune against his eardrums, and the rhythm is a measured pounding throughout his body. At first he mistakes it for a heartbeat; an unhurried internal cadence that travels all the way up his spine, singing along his nerve endings.

And then he realises that he is paralysed, that his body is unresponsive to any commands he gives, and that the rhythm he feels is made up of the slow, exploratory thrusts of someone starting to fuck him open.

“Hello, Tim,” Danny says quietly. His mouth finds the back of Tim’s neck. “How was your day?”

Tim couldn’t reply if he wanted to; his thoughts don’t translate into words, his mouth will not give voice to anything other than ragged panting. Rhythmic, like the gentle thrusts that edge ever deeper inside him. He’s dimply aware of discomfort, an ache that suggests he wasn’t as ready for it as he could have been. Or maybe it’s just been that long since he took a cock.

He’s not as scared as he should be. Panic is slow to come to his lethargic joints; he feels drugged, doctored, dulled by means he doesn’t understand. He’s not afraid. He’s not much of anything.

 _Hi, Danny_ , he thinks. _My day was pretty shit, to be honest. You maybe want to explain what’s going on here?_

There isn’t much that needs explaining. Danny pushes forward, eases another inch inside him, and then pulls back just far enough that Tim can feel the tip of his cock tugging at the edges of him. Danny kisses his neck, mouthing at the line of stitches he finds there.

“I’m sorry about these,” he says. “Consider them a temporary costume for dress rehearsals. When the time comes, I’ll get you the real thing. You’ll be properly outfitted for the dance.”

 _What dance,_ Tim thinks. _What fucking dance, what other secrets have they been keeping from me in the Archives? Why do you make it sound like I should know about this?_ He gives an involuntary grunt as Danny thrusts back into him, stretching him progressively wider. He’s slick, and moves easily, but he’s clearly making an effort not to go too deep. Not just yet.

 _Mustn’t tear the skin_ , Tim thinks in a moment of clarity. _Can’t have that. It wouldn’t look as nice when something wears me_.

He can’t understand why he isn’t afraid. He feels the odd, slightly rubbery texture of Danny’s thighs against his, feels the stitches in his hands, smells cloves and chemical preservative and _knows_ that his brother his dead, and that his brother is fucking him into the mattress with all the strength and precision of a machine. But Tim isn’t scared. It doesn’t make sense.

 _What have you done to me?_ he thinks.

Again, Danny kisses his neck, the little line of stitch marks Tim has no memory of receiving. He seems fascinated by them, in a way that Tim should find revolting. He feels the slightly waxy texture of Danny’s mouth, the chap stick he must need to apply constantly to keep the dead skin supple.

“I was the first,” Danny says. There is no exertion in his voice, no catch in his breath. Of course not. Dancers have to be very fit. “Nikola made me before all the others. It’s why I’m different. She didn’t know then that you have to kill the donors before you take their skins to dance with. She didn’t know that their last thoughts would carry over into the dance, and play their own aching accompaniment to our music.”

He strokes a hand through Tim’s hair, pressing down where the skin stings a little, marking a line of stitches up the back of his skull. They mean to open him up that way. They will keep his face intact.

Danny adjusts his angle a little, grabs Tim’s hip and bucks up into him, and Tim hears himself moan. Feels himself going reflexively tight around Danny’s cock, to keep him where he’s most needed, at the angle he feels best. To keep him close.

“Danny was thinking of you at the end,” he is told in a soft tone that so closely resembles his brother’s. “He was confused. He wanted you to be there with him, but he wanted you far away. He wanted you happy; that was his last thought, as his muscles surrendered their sticky hold on the underside of his skin. He wanted you to live a happy life. And now I want the same.”

Tim wants things too. Wants to move his limbs, even just a little; wants freedom from under the weight that bears him down onto the mattress, that heats him up from the inside out and has him growing hard from the steady friction; wants to grab the thing that is almost Danny, to beat it until it _stops_. Until its true kaleidoscopic colours bleed out through the gaps he will tear in his brother’s skin.

But his body doesn’t belong to him, and his mind is a fog-smothered field, visibility: zero. And right now his most pressing wants can be expressed as _harder_ , and _deeper_ , and _fast enough to make me scream for it._

He can hear his own moans rise in uneven volume as Danny starts to pick up the pace, to put some real force into fucking him. He’s all the way in, his oddly-textured thighs smacking hard against Tim’s with each thrust, the sound of it not quite like skin-on-skin. Tim feels his face drag against the pillow as he’s pushed up the bed, and his hands itch with the stitching and the need to clutch at the sheets. His insides feel like they’re on fire; he welcomes the pressure that every downward thrust puts on his cock, where it lies trapped under his stomach.

“You’re going to be my partner in the dance,” Danny tells him. “The others will be given their partners by Nikola, but I chose you. Because of Danny. You were the last thought in his mind, and the first one in mine. I’ve been waiting for you to be ready.”

There’s a little wet patch forming on the sheets under Tim’s stomach. He leaks a hazy, guilty arousal. If he could, he’d be tilting his hips up to take Danny at a better angle. He’d brace himself on the mattress, take him deep, flaunt how much he can handle.

Showmanship runs in the family.

One of Danny’s hands comes to rest on the pillow by Tim’s cheek. From the corner of his eye, Tim can see the skin flex and contract with the force of Danny’s thrusts; there is no muscle, there are no tendons underneath, but there is _something_ flickering in between the gaps in his stitches, and it is a hypnotic haze of colour and movement, briefly coated in Danny’s ill-fitting skin, like one inadequate coat of whitewash on a graffiti mural.

This is his future. This is what he has coming, if he continues down his current path, ignores Elias’ orders and strays too far from his useless little flock. Not revenge; reunion. This is how he’ll be with Danny again.

Tim gives himself over to the rhythm of Danny’s thrusts, to the slick heat of the cock that slips into him and sparks up parts of himself he’d assumed were dead. He feels lit up from the inside; like a light show, like an ostentatious fireworks display. He is manoeuvred and manipulated, he is made to feel bright and whole and _alive_.

Danny takes one of Tim’s hands, limp on the sheets. Where the stitches of his wrist meet the tattoos of Tim’s there is a bleed of colour. Prismatic, diluted, he sees his skin take on unnatural hues, a reflection of Danny’s new interior. It’s just an illusion; nothing permanent, nothing more than a moment of foresight, a peek into his personal crystal ball. This is the only future he’ll be allowed.

He’s not sure he doesn’t want it. He’s not sure of anything anymore.

“Save the last dance for me, Tim,” says the creature Danny became.

Tim can’t move his mouth to answer.


End file.
